iPhone 3G’s iOS 4.1 Upgrade Cannot Come Soon Enough

When I signed up to Apple’s iPhone Developer programme I had full intention of developing some really cool apps. It has not happened yet, but I have been able to get the latest and greatest iPhone OS betas installed on my phone and have been able to start using the latest features early, which is always a good feeling. The down-side to this is that it is sometimes a rather buggy experience. I feel Apple uses the word “beta” too loosely, when it should be using “alpha”.

You know, that iOS 4.1 release can't come fast enough. My 3G has been DOG slow since I upgraded to 4. :-(

Twitter post by @thepegisin

When I upgraded to the first beta release of iOS 4, it seemed pretty snappy, but there was occasional slowness, which I simply put down to it being a beta release. With each new beta, more slowness. Still, I put it down to the beta label. “They’ve probably got the debug mode turned on”, I thought. I could not wait for the real release as I did not want to downgrade to version 3.1, since I really liked the single Inbox and the ability to easily archive messages from the Inbox, rather than deleting them, as it had been in 3.1. But it was slooooow.

My iPhone 3G really slow on 4.0... Sometimes I even want to smash on a wall! Waiting for 4.1 - they promise to make it as fast as it was

Twitter post by @ezaritov

So, the day came, 4.0 gold master final release “this-is-it” was released to the world. I upgraded. My iPhone 3G went from being really slow and unresponsive to… well, really slow and unresponsive. No change as far as I could see. Surely it must be my phone, because I could not believe Apple would release this.

It seems Apple did release this and released it rather untested on the iPhone 3G. You can see from the below graph of Google’s Real-time search that since the release of iOS 4.0 the posts on Twitter containing the words “iphone 3g slow” has been quite sustained. It will be interesting to see if this graph shows this activity dying off after the update to iOS 4.1 is released on September 8th 2010.

Search activity on Twitter for "iphone 3g slow"

iOS 4.1 is supposed to resolve all the issues with performance on the iPhone 3G, so it will be interesting to see if we can get back to 3.1 performance levels, or we’ll be downgrading to 3.1 to get back to 3.1 performance levels.

Here’s an interesting post that suggests turning off Spotlight on the iphone, as that may be culprit. I’ve just done this, so I’ll have to post an update and let you know how it goes.